[ en ] The day after: the movement beyond the protest

In his famous speech at Occupy Wall Street, Slavoj Žižek offered the
people in attendance (and curious internet users around the world) an
important warning in the form of friendly advice: “don’t fall in love
with yourselves. We’re having a nice time here. But remember, carnivals
come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return
to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?” For the indignados of
the 15-M movement in Spain, the general election results of November
20th marked the start of the metaphorical day after.

That the
right-wing Partido Popular would take an absolute majority of the
government with only a minor increase in votes due to the spectacular
disintegration of popular support for the outgoing Partido Socialista
was no surprise to anyone, especially the indignados. What may have
surprised some, however, is the relatively low intensity of
mobilizations since the right wing took office and, slowly but steadily,
announced that they would implement the same neoliberal policies and
violent austerity imposed by technocratic regimes in Greece and Italy.

As
Amador Fernández-Savater recently put it, the questions on a lot of
peoples’ minds seem to be: “where are all those people who occupied the
plazas and neighbourhood assemblies during the spring? Have they become
disenchanted with the movement? Are they incapable of making lasting
compromises? Are they resigned to their fates?”

Fernández-Savater
doesn’t think so. “With no study in hand and generalizing simply based
on the people I know personally and my own observations of myself, I
think that, in general, people have gone on with their lives … But
saying that they’ve gone on with their lives is a bad expression. For
once you’ve gone through the plazas, you don’t leave the same, nor do
you go back to the same life. Paradoxically, you come back to a new
life: touched, crossed, affected by 15-M.”

And as he so eloquently
puts it, 15-M is no mere social organization, but “a new social
climate.” But how does a social climate organize itself? What new
possibilities have revealed themselves after months of self-management,
cooperative civil disobedience and massive mobilization, and what
remains to be done?

Over time, the wave of mobilizations that
first hit the shores of the Mediterranean and extended outwards over the
course of 2011 has overcome its initial, expressive phase. This phase
managed to substitute the dominant narrative with our own. We now know
that the problem is not some mysterious technical failure we call a
crisis, but the intentional crimes of a cleptocracy.

This
distinction is crucial: while the first suggests a management dilemma
that opposes left- and right-wing approaches to the crisis, the second
draws a line between the 1 percent who abuse power in order to steal
from the people and those who refuse to consent and choose to resist in
the name of the other 99 percent.

Having reached this point, the
obvious question becomes, “Now what?” Of course we should continue to
protest together, especially if we choose to do so intermittently and
massively, favouring a general critique of the system over particular
causes. And at the smaller scale, that those specific struggles continue
to take the streets is also desirable.

However, it is
fundamentally important that these struggles are not overly disconnected
from one another or the more general movement; that they unfold beyond
their own spaces (hospitals, schools, factories, offices and so on) and
into the broader metropolitan spaces of cleptocratic dominance. These
processes serve to keep the questions that guide the movement alive and,
therefore, adapting to the always changing situations in which they
operate. Yet the question of what alternatives we can provide remains.

The
conquest of political power, particularly in liberal democracies, is
not the most important task of social change. Political change tends to
occur once social changes have already taken place. Thus, if what we
desire is to change existing social relations and inequalities, it makes
little sense to prioritize a change of political power with the hope
that social change will be installed from above.

Instead, the first challenge, as John Holloway
once put it, is to “change the world without taking power”, to build
and strengthen the alternative institutions of the commons. By
institutions, of course, we are not referring to the institutions of a
political regime such as parliaments, executives and the like. Nor are
we referring to those which may lie between the regime and the movement,
such as political parties, unions or other organizations.

We are
referring to institutions which provide a foundation for the movement
and are defined by their own autonomy: social centers, activist
collectives, alternative media, credit unions and co-operatives.
Institutions like these constitute no more and no less than material
spaces in which we can articulate the values, social practices and
lifestyles underlying the social climate change taking place all over
the world.

In many places, these alternative institutions are
already under construction. In Catalonia, the Cooperativa Integral
Catalana, which serves to integrate various work and consumption co-ops
in the region through shared spaces, education, stores, legal services,
and meetings, already has 850 members, thousands of users and has
inspired more “integral co-ops” all over Spain.

Meanwhile, in the
United States, 130 million Americans now participate in the ownership of
co-operatives and credit unions, and 13 million Americans have become
worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million
more than belong to private-sector unions. Over the coming weeks and
months, we hope to explore some of these alternative institutions and
the possibilities they open up for the 99 percent.

In their seminal work Empire,
political theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri examine the way in
which a cleptocratic empire controls people through what Michel Foucault
called biopower: “a situation in which what is directly at stake in
power is the production and reproduction of life itself.” In many ways,
this is the force we are defeating when our experiences together in the
streets, the plazas and the assemblies inform our daily lives and our
decisions in the long run.

The spectacular moments we share are an
exhilarating, fundamental source of energy for the movement all over
the world. They are also fodder for a sensationalist mainstream media
which devours events to leave us with the superficial scraps of
headlines, sound-bites and riot porn.

But the revolution is not
being televised precisely because it is happening inside and between us.
We are moving too slowly for their sound-bites because we are going
far, wide and deep. And, if we play our cards right, we will be in
control of our time, our work and our lives before they know it.